 CLOSING THE GAP Tuesday, October 19, 2021 
America's largest and most successful companies – those in the S&P 500 index — surpassed a new milestone in 2021, 30% of board directors are now women, according to a new report from executive search firm Spencer Stuart, which analyzes company regulatory filings.
The S&P 500 includes America's biggest consumer and retail companies like Walmart, Amazon, FedEx and Walgreens, which employ hundreds of thousands of front-line female workers. In the broader group of U.S. public companies that comprise the Russell 3,000, 25% of board seats are now held by women.
We watch progress toward gender equality in the boardroom closely here at CNBC, since board directors have an outsize impact on steering company policies on things like compensation and child-care support. (Not to mention the wealth of research indicating that more diverse companies perform better. For example, in 2018 a McKinsey report found that diverse companies are 33% more likely to have greater financial returns than their industry peers.)
And the implementation of policies that support women in the workforce could not be more important at this moment. More than 300,000 women left the workforce in September, according to the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
When it comes to driving change, 30% is a bit of a magic number that I watch for, since research has shown that for a group to have a real seat at the table and impact decision-making, it needs to make up at least 30% of the total body.
So this latest report is great news, right? Not so fast.
Hiring women has slipped down the list of priorities for board nominating and governing committees — from No. 3 to No. 10. And it shows. 43% of the new class of board directors were women, down from 47% in 2020.
This trend of slowing progress raises some questions: Has the movement to recruit more women to corporate boardrooms had its moment in the sunshine? Or is it just taken for granted as a priority these days?
"We saw a change in the 2021 proxy year," said Julie Hembrock Daum, who leads the North American board practice at Spencer Stuart, in an emailed response. "In the wake of the racial justice reckoning that highlighted the lack of progress companies have made in increasing ethnic and racial representation on boards and in executive ranks, boards prioritized the recruitment of directors from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups."
Nearly half (47%) of the new class of independent directors were Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino/a, Asian American, Indian/Native Alaskan or multiracial, a significant jump from last year (21%). Within that group, 29% were male and 18% female. Indeed, 88 boards in the S&P 500 index added board seats to increase racial/ethnic diversity.
Encouragingly, adding diversity to corporate boardrooms looks set to be a key priority for years to come.
Another key priority? Adding directors with industry knowledge. Women from these sectors were the most in demand in 2021: consumer (18%), technology (16%), financial services (13%), industrial (9%) and private equity/investment management (6%).
So, that's a snapshot of how women at the very top of the workforce are doing (the average pay for a board director is $312,279 a year, by the way). How gender diverse is management at your company? Are women well represented among decision-makers? Share your thoughts with us at askmakeit@cnbc.com.  More articles from Closing the Gap She co-founded a $1 billion fintech start-up in Asia — and wants to show other women they can, too Tessa Wijaya describes herself as "a unicorn among unicorns among unicorns." As an Indonesian woman running a $1 billion financial technology start-up in Southeast Asia, she is a rather rare breed. Wijaya shares with Make It correspondent Karen Gilchrist on how she found her footing in fintech and how she's working to help other women do the same. Olympic BMX champion reveals the life lessons she learned from her part-time job This summer, 22-year-old Beth Shriever won Britain's first-ever gold medal for BMX racing at the Tokyo Olympics. But the road to gold wasn't always an easy ride. Shriever talked losing her funding in 2017, the lessons she learned from being a teaching assistant and her aspirations for the next Olympics with Make It's Vicky McKeever. How this 54-year-old Latina CEO's 'love for hair' inspired her to build a multimillion-dollar beauty brand When Carolyn Aronson was 18, she worked full time as a hairdresser while studying for her business degree in the evening. Now, Aronson is the CEO of It's a 10 Haircare, the brand she founded in 2006, that now brings in more than $500 million in sales annually.
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Selasa, 19 Oktober 2021
There’s something happening inside the boardrooms of America’s biggest companies
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